by Catalina Camia, USA TODAY

by Catalina Camia, USA TODAY

While he was chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Dick Harpootlian was known for his "pithy and pungent comments." Now, he's trying to apologize and clarify such a remark he made last week about GOP Gov. Nikki Haley.

Harpootlian said he hoped South Carolina voters next year send "Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from" - a comment that many Republicans believed was racist because of Haley's Indian heritage. Haley, South Carolina's first female and minority governor, is up for re-election in 2014.

"I'm the grandson of immigrants. She's not from India," Harpootlian said Tuesday on MSNBC. "She's from Bamberg, South Carolina, where she was an accountant in her parents' clothing store called Exotica. All I'm suggesting is she needs to go back to being an accountant in a dress store rather than being this fraud of a governor that we have."

Harpootlian's original comment about Haley came during the state Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner on Friday night, which featured Vice President Biden. Chad Connelly, the Palmetto State's GOP chairman, tweeted over the weekend that Harpootlian's remark about Haley was "despicable."

Last year during the Democratic National Convention, Harpootlian raised eyebrows by comparing Haley, a Tea Party favorite elected in 2010, to Hitler's mistress Eva Braun. The Democrat didn't back down from the analogy in a CNN interview, saying he "wasn't trying to insinuate that Nikki was a Nazi."

"I was saying that she was hanging out in an insular bunker in Charlotte when she won't give access to the press here in South Carolina," he said. "So she has some hurt feelings? I didn't know she had feelings."

Harpootlian's two-year tenure as Democratic Party chairman in South Carolina is now over. Jaime Harrison, an attorney from Orangeburg who also happens to be black, was elected Saturday in an uncontested race.